Content, Content, Content

I have found the Elephant’s Graveyard of Apple II programs and it is called Asimov’s.

One problem facing anyone looking to revive their computing experiences of a quarter century ago (or longer) is where you can get programs. There were thousands of great programs written for the Apple II, everything from utilities to games. Some were made by Apple and other “large” publishers but many more were made by small one or two person above the garage companies that never published anything before or since. Fortunately, there are archivists among the Apple community who have preserved and collected these programs and made them available for the rest of us to use.

Many of the 5.25” and even 3.5” floppy disks that I have used died well before their time. As overbuilt as I thought the floppy disk drives were in their day, they too have often died a premature death or become so impaired that they were no longer usable. Thankfully, this is no longer a requirement to enjoy the great programs of the Apple II line of computers.

The problem is solved by a program called ShrinkIt by Andrew E. Nicholas) that creates a compressed image of the original floppy disk (sort of like a ZIP or RAR file for the old Apples) that can be used for storage or transmission of the disks. It is not an executable file and must be restored to a floppy disk or a hard disk subdirectory before being run. Since ShrinkIt expects everything to be in its normal place, it does not work on any copy-protected disks or those with a non-standard version of DOS as found on some game disks. While ShrinkIt will extract all of the real data from a disk, there are also programs that will copy copy-protected programs with a “nibble copier.” There are several other formats that of Apple disk images around including:

- Universal Disk Images (.2mg, .2img)
- DiskCopy 4.2 (.dsk)
- Copy II Plus (.img)
- Sim //e HDV images (.hdv)
- TrackStar 40-track images (.app)
- Dalton's Disk Disintegrator (DDD v2.1+, DDD Pro v1.1+) (.ddd)
- Raw FDI images of 5.25" and 3.5 disks (read-only) (.fdi)
- Unadorned sector-format files (.po, .do, .d13, .raw, .hdv, .iso, most .dc6)
- Unadorned nibble-format files (.nib, .nb2)
- ShrinkIt (NuFX) compressed disk images (.shk, .sdk)

Many of these are stored in an archive called Asimov’s at http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/ and are available free. The offerings run from system utilities to games with about everything in between. They are available for:

- DOS 3.2/3.3 (13, 16, or 32 sectors, up to 50 tracks)
- ProDOS
- UCSD Pascal
- CP/M

Sometimes a Floppy is Not Enough

Hard disks for microcomputers were just starting to come on the scene when I exited Apple for the dark side of a PC clone and a copy of MS DOS. Over the almost thirty years since then the price has declined from around $20,000 for a 5 MB drive to less than $100 for over .5 TB. Along with this decrease in price has also come an increase in reliability and access speed. Given those circumstances, I am not a purist to the extent of demanding a hard disk originally intended for an 8-bit Apple. Plus, I have lost hard disks that were less than a year old. I could not imagine depending upon a hard disk 25 or more years old. Thankfully, I do not have to rely on one.

Current companies have developed an IDE adapter that fits the original Apple expansion bus. Other bright people have combined this type adapter with a Compact Flash (CF) memory cardholder allowing the CF card to be a solid-state hard disk. After a bit of research I selected the MicroDrive from ReactiveMicro of New Jersey (http://www.reactivemicro.com/). At $135, it includes all I needed to restart in Apple computing.

Beyond the essential hardware (including a 128 MB CF card yielding four 32 MB Apple ProDOS hard disks and a USB CF adapter for using the CF card on a PC or Mac), Henry Courbis of ReactiveMicro preloads all four hard disks with preformatted disk images. While disks 3 and 4 are empty and ready for anything you may want to put there (mine are still empty), disk 2 has Glen Bredon’s DOS.MASTER preinstalled to allow you to use DOS 3.3 applications within an Apple ProDOS hard disk. Disk 1 is already formatted with the final ProDOS release and many critical utilities. Among those utilities are:

- MicroDrive Utilities
- ShrinkIt
- CopyIIPlus
- DiskMaker 8
- Disk2File

Also included is a 5.25” flip floppy to get you started as well as a CD with additional documentation and utilities such as Andy McFadden’s Windows based CiderPress file manager.

Since the Apple nominally boots from the highest slot number to the lowest, I put the MicroDrive in slot 7, turned on the power, and grinned from ear-to-ear.

The Machine

Twenty-five or more years had elapsed since I last touched an Apple. (We’ll forget that unfortunate incident with a Mac.) First, I wanted to learn what had happened in the Apple ][ line over the years. Early on, I came upon a great Apple history site by Steven Weyhrich called Apple II History at http://apple2history.org/index.html. Well worth the effort.

I realized several things from reading the history:
- While the IIgs is a superior machine, I am, at this stage, more interested in a “classic” Apple ][ with built-in keyboard.
- The //e series was the best choice for me since a number of the critical features I enjoyed on my original Apple were already built-in without changing the basic function and form of the machine.
- The IIc was also out for me because it was not easily expandable although it has even more features built-in.
- Within the //e series, the final edition, the Platinum, would be a better fit as I have come to use the numeric pad a lot in the past 25 years.

Turning to the world’s garage sale, eBay, I started researching past sales for historic realizations on Apples. Some were crazy with absurd bids (while the same item was offered for less than 1% that did not sell.) Most bids for machines were reasonable with only a few bidders interested. Long story short, I picked up a Platinum IIe, two disk drives (1/2 height), and a color monitor. It all arrived safe in two boxes and then the fun started. Did I mention that I had no disks yet?

Everything Starts (Again) Somewhere

This is a journal of my rediscovery of the Apple ][.

Once upon a time back in the 1970s, I had an Apple ][ with Integer BASIC in ROM. It was a great machine and did everything I asked of it. In those days it was all new, everyday brought word of new hardware or a new technique in programming on the Apple. At 1 MHz for the CPU and 48 KB of RAM, it was the finest 8-bit machine available at the time, or since. One thing to another and I parted with the Apple in late 1980 or early 1981. Recently I stepped back into the arena and picked up an Apple IIe Platinum from a vendor on eBay.

Many things have changed since then; many more (like the fun) have not changed.

These blogs chronicle my rediscovery of the Apple, some of the adventures in finding things (both hardware and software), some of the sites I have found on the web, some of the vendors still producing items for the Apples, and some of the people I have encountered along the way.

There is a lot of catch-up as this is written somewhere along in the process so many of the early entries may not be in correct chronological order.

Comments, suggestions, references, and general what-have-you are always welcome.